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Mavis Reimer

Mavis Reimer is the Canada Research Chair in the Culture of Childhood, director of the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures, and an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg.

In 1979, Reimer completed her MA at Dalhousie University with a thesis about Renaissance and Jacobean drama. As a new mother at the time, Reimer was enjoying the delights of reading children’s literature, which caused her to rethink many of the questions generated by literary theory from the perspective of children’s literature. Reimer returned to do her PhD in Children’s Literature at the University of Calgary, graduating in 1994. Her thesis was entitled "Tales Out of School: L.T. Meade and the School Story."

Since the mid 1980s, Reimer has had numerous scholarly articles on children’s literature published in leading literary journals. She also wrote the submission "Canadian Children's Literature in English" for the International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature (2004). In addition to collaborating with Nodelman for the third edition of The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (2003, Reimer has edited of a collection of essays on Anne of Green Gables entitled Such a Simple Little Tale (1992, 2003). Her most recent project is a collection of essays that explore the complex idea of home: Home Words: Discourses of Children's Literature in Canada (2008). Reimer’s own essay in the collection focuses on home as ideology in Canadian children’s literature.

For more information on Mavis Reimer, visit her website.

Select Publications:

  • Home Words: Discourses of Children's Literature in Canada (2008)
  • "Worlds of Girls: Educational Reform and Fictional Form in L.T. Meade's School Stories," Culturing the Child 1690-1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers, ed. Donelle Ruwe (2005)
  • The Pleasures of Children's Literature, 3rd ed., co-authored with Perry Nodelman. (2003)
  • Such a Simple Little Tale: Critical Responses to L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1992, 2003)
  • "Making Princesses, Re-Making A Little Princess." In Voices of the Other: Children's Literature and the Postcolonial Context, ed. Roderick McGillis (2000)